[FR]: automatic updates

[dumbmoron]

Description

Helium on Windows should have automatic updates

Who's implementing?

• I'm willing to implement this feature myself

The problem

Windows has no auto updates

Possible solutions

• investigate possible existing solutions for this (WinSparkle et al.)
• choose a solution, make sure it is integrable in a privacy-preserving way, similarly to sparkle on macOS (manifest URL is controllable at runtime, fetching can be disabled/enabled at runtime)
• integrate it with helium, including: background updates (when helium is running, NOT a separate service), help page updates, build process/CI setup

Additional context

No response

[dumbmoron]

i do not currently feel like doing this since I do not use windows, but if any windows users would like to work on this I am opening this FR to track it

[wukko]

i do not currently feel like doing this since I do not use windows

same

[lewisakura]

i can investigate this since i heavily use helium on windows

what are the general thoughts on velopack? i personally think its a better idea than winsparkle since we can write our own custom updater logic (including background updates) and not have a ghostty incident when you're in the middle of using the browser

i have some experience with velopack for other applications so i can probably get a working integration ready in a reasonable amount of time after i familiarise myself with the codebase

[dumbmoron]

velopack looks good to me at a glance, there are just a few hard requirements as mentioned in OP. i see it has delta updates so that's nice

[lewisakura]

i think we can hit all those requirements, vpk is very flexible when it comes to the update process and how you can integrate it

[Bsd-us]

I'd like to suggest https://codeberg.org/ltguillaume/chromium-winupdater which could probably be adapted or even used as is, easily
It is a fork from the same guy doing https://codeberg.org/ltguillaume/librewolf-winupdater which is the official windows updater used by Librewolf

[baltazarandersson]

@Bsd-us I took a look at chromium-winupdater. While it’s definitely the easiest way to get updates running quickly, I have some concerns about using it for Helium:

• Since it relies on AutoHotkey (AHK) and PowerShell, these scripts are frequently flagged by Windows Defender and other AVs as malware (often Trojan.AutoHK), which would be a bad look for a privacy-focused browser.
• It tends to pop up visible console windows during checks/updates, whereas we want a seamless, "native" feel.

I think integrating WinSparkle is the better long-term move. It runs as a native C++ library inside the browser process (so no external script warnings), supports proper cryptographic signing (Ed25519) for security, and provides a much cleaner UI.

The main blocker right now is getting WinSparkle to play nice with Chromium's GN build system. If anyone here has experience with writing BUILD.gn configs for third-party libraries, that would be a huge help to get this moving

[ssswagatss]

Wow. Looks like no one cares for windows users !!

[wukko]

Wow. Looks like no one cares for windows users !!

yeah